


My Choice of Men

by DWEmma



Category: Jolene (Song) - Dolly Parton
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jolene talks about her affairs with married men, and how this one affair was different than all the rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Choice of Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [muzzleofbees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/muzzleofbees/gifts).



I’ve always been the type of woman who was second best. Not in the looks department. I’m almost always the prettiest woman in any room. Though I’m the first to admit it when I see someone prettier than I. When I’m bored, I tend to look around at all the women to rank everyone in order. It’s not a judgment. It’s just what I do when I’m bored. 

Where I’m second best is in relationships. Men will take a vacation from their wives to sleep with me, but they always go back. And single men always find a girl that they want to settle down with, making us have “the talk” when they leave me for her. Because I’m second best. 

I don’t know why this is. You’d think that men would want to be with a woman as beautiful as I. And for all that I’m talking , I’m not arrogant about it. It sounds like I am, but I’m not. I’m just being honest. Ever since I was a little girl, my looks were all that people could remark on. Little boys tripped over themselves to get to me, and it’s been that way ever since. Married men especially flock to me. 

I don’t mind the attention. It breaks up the day. And since I work with the public, it makes the day more fun. I’m a bank teller. So mostly what I do is hand out money to people, make them cashier’s checks, and listen to them complain. That there are a few men who come in for the pleasure of looking at me and talking to me while they try to get up the nerve to make a move on me makes the day go by faster. And I’m not saying that I’d say yes to all of them. If I’m not attracted to a man, I don’t care how much money he has. (And because of my profession, I know at least how much liquid money he has.) But if I’m attracted to him, and he wants me…I rarely give the fourth finger on his left hand more than a fleeting thought. 

And I’ve turned men down in the past, ones who I’ve wanted, ones who wanted me…and they go off and find another woman to have an affair with. So I don’t blame myself for saying yes. Saying no wouldn’t stop him from having an affair. Saying no just means I don’t get to gain from his dalliance. 

And I do gain. Being second best generally means the best sex, the best gifts, and the best dinner reservations (two towns over.) It means phone calls assuring you that even though he’s with her, it’s you who’s on his mind the whole time. Second best, in a way, means first best. It just means I don’t have to deal with his stinky socks on the bedroom floor and making sure he remembers to bring his lunch to work in the mornings. 

So I’m fine with it. No drama, no fuss. Would I like one day to meet my soul mate and settle down and raise a horde of kids with him? Actually, no, but it would be nice to have someone appear who could take vacations with me and be around for the holidays. And it would be nice to be with someone knowing that some psycho woman isn’t going to randomly show up at my work one day to chew me out and beg that I release the control I have over her man. As if I’m the one in control. 

This one woman, short, blond, really pretty, but in a trashy sort of way, would always come into the bank with her man. Every week they’d come in for some reason, and somehow always ended up at my window. He liked me. I could tell. I can always tell. But he always came in with her, so all he ever gave me were polite but vaguely knowing smiles, while I made nice with both of them.   
Until the week he came in without her. Actually, they had already been in that week. But he came in a second time by himself. With some question he had about his account, but I could tell that he didn’t really have a question about anything. Well questions about anything related to his account. 

He was tall. Blond. Handsome. I never understood why the phrase tall, light, and handsome never took off. He was all of that. And he was nervous. It was charming. He also kept playing with his wedding ring as he tried to work the conversation away from his false bank inquiry and to his attempt to ask me out. That was less adorable.

He asked if I liked to go dancing. I mentioned a dance hall that my girl friends and I always go to on Tuesday nights after work. “Are you always there on Tuesdays?” he asked. I always am.

And things took off from there. As they always do. Not to tell tales out of school, but that man was something else. His prowess on the dance floor translated nicely to more horizontal dance moves, as well. I found myself thinking about him when things got slow at the bank. And I try not do that wit married men. Unless they’re actively with me, I try not to spend mental energy on them. IT’s not a god use of time with the married ones. Either they’ll get caught and stop seeing me, or they’ll have a scare and think they’ve been caught, and that’ll send them back to their little woman, tail between their scared little legs. They are not the bad boys they fancy themselves. 

He was not the bad boy he fancied himself. In fact, he liked to talk about his wife after we had sex. He had a massive virgin/whore complex with the poor sweet girl. He was afraid to defile her with his sexual needs. They had sex, but not the mildly dirty sort that he preferred. Of course, he thought his mildly dirty fantasies were positively wild. I let him go on thinking that. 

Most men either don’t want to talk about their wives at all, or they want to complain about her. She doesn’t listen to him, she doesn’t meet his sexual needs, she doesn’t understand him. This man just wanted to talk about how much he loved his wife, loved her so much that he had to sleep with me to keep her pristine so his love for her won’t tarnish. It was sweet but sort of creepy. 

I didn’t know my place in all of this. Should I keep being the bad girl he so desired? Should I encourage him to treat me in the deliciously salacious way that he treats me? If I get him to sexually indulge himself in this wife he obviously loves so much, will I lose him? Part of me wondered what it would be like to have someone love me this much. It sounded stifling. It made me feel claustrophobic. And the idea that someone would ignore my body while fetishizing my purity made me a little ill? Sad? Confused. It made me confused. 

Because my body had been my draw since my teen years, when my boyfriend was 25. My poor mother supported it with the idea that of course I would marry him the moment I finished high school. But I needed out of my small town life. And I don’t believe he actually loved me for anything other than how I looked. So the moment I finished high school, I said goodbye to all of them. And I found that big city live took to me and I to it. I don’t believe I’ve ever had to buy my own drink. Not ever. I’m prized. Just not the way he prized his wife. 

The day that she came into the bank by herself, walking fast like a bat out of hell, her high heels clicking on the marble floor like the patter of drums when an army marches to war, I knew I was in trouble. 

“Are you Jolene?” she asked, her drawl thick in her voice. I nodded. “I need you to stop seeing my husband.” I began to protest, to protect all three of us from pain and discomfort, but she cut me off. “ Don’t even try to deny it, Jolene. He talks about you in his sleep. He cries out your name. And as far as I know, you, pretty little thing, are the only Jolene he knows. Now look at you. Your beauty is beyond compare. No false modesty, please. Look at your auburn hair. It positively flames in the sunlight. Your skin is ivory like it ain’t never seen the sun. Emerald green eyes? And now, you ain’t smiling now, but you know it’s like the breath of spring coming upon us after a long winter. I just can’t compete with you, Jolene. I know that. I’m cute, and I’ve got a great body, but he doesn’t feel that way about me. You could easily understand how you could take him if you wanted him. He feels that way about you. But you don’t know what he means to me Jolene. He’s the only man for me. I couldn’t love again. He’s it. While you? You could have your choice of men. I’m begging of you Jolene. Please don’t take my man. Even though you could. Please don’t.” 

I looked at her. So sweet. So desperate. Was this love? This need to own someone, to keep him for yourself, the negotiations happening between women for the ownership of grown men? If so, I wanted no part in love. I wanted no part in this drama played between women where men were the objects to be owned. I took a deep breath and smiled my breath of spring smile at her: “Thank you for all the compliments. But you should really talk to your husband about this. He’s his own person and he’ll make his own choices. He’s not something we’re going to negotiate over.” She looked like she was about to cry. So I gave her a little hope. “But just between you and me, he might talk about me in his sleep, but he talks about you when he’s awake. And men never decide to stay with me. They just don’t.” 

She gave me a sort of sad look to that, almost like she wanted to apologize to me. Bless her: she didn’t. She made some sort of noise, not quite a word, and her heels went click click click out of my life, slower, and with less purpose than with which they entered. I never saw her or her husband again.


End file.
